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Criminal Defence Service (Information Requests) (Amendment) Regulations 2010

I am grateful to both noble Lords, who have approached these orders in slightly different but extremely helpful ways. I shall answer the noble Lord, Lord Henley, as best I can. Yes, it would be great to have the jigsaw in place on one occasion. It has not happened here, but there are good reasons for that. He is right to say that the two statutory instruments he referred to are negative. He asked about fraud in relation to the first statutory instrument. I cannot help him very much. It is not possible to make an accurate estimate, given that more than 1.6 million acts of assistance are provided, but these regulations are of course designed to make the process transparent for defendants and the fund. As Minister responsible for legal aid, I often receive letters from Members of Parliament if one of their constituents has said to them, often in matrimonial cases, "Look, the person on the other side should not be legally aided. Why aren’t I?" There are ways of looking into such matters, which involve closer working with the DWP than was previously possible. The noble Lord also asked about the second order. If the first appeal was to the staff and the second to the court, he asked, was there a further appeal? Only by way of judicial review, but it does exist. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, referred to the recent decisions made about the Legal Services Commission. For the time being, the commission remains a non-governmental public body. Primary legislation will be needed for it to change its status to that of executive agency. We hope to legislate on that matter, literally as soon as possible, but for now the commission, under a new chief executive, carries on with the functions that it has in law under the Access to Justice Act 1999. The orders are before the House today so that the Crown Court means-testing policy, which has already begun in some adopter areas—I have visited Preston Crown Court, for example, where this has already been introduced, and cases are beginning to come through from the magistrates’ courts—can be started. Whether or not it will be a success we do not know yet; the jury is out. I remember well the noble Lord’s concerns about that matter. We will have to see. The burden of what the noble Lord had to say, though, was to get me to try to answer the "independence" criticism that has been made. The decision eventually to abolish the Legal Services Commission as it is and move it to an executive agency has been widely supported by the Bar, the Law Society and many commentators. We counter the argument about independence that he refers to by saying that the last thing that Ministers would do under the new system is decide individual cases on legal aid; that would be quite wrong. How will we stop individual Ministers doing that? As I understand it, the Bill is being drafted to change the status of the body by including a clause that makes clear the position—that it will not be for Ministers to make decisions on individual cases—although I cannot guarantee that that will be in the Bill. The other way that it is done by the DWP at present is to ensure that there is an independent body to appeal to on a decision so that it cannot be said that the department, let alone a Minister, has the final word on an individual decision on legal aid.